OBITUARY

OBITUARY; ADRIAN S. FISHER, 69, ARMS TREATY NEGOTIATOR

Published: March 19, 1983

Adrian S. Fisher, a leading arms control negotiator and former dean of the Georgetown University Law Center, died of cancer yesterday at his home in Washington. He was 69 years old.

Mr. Fisher was the first deputy director of the United States Arms Control and Disarmament Agency and a leading American negotiator of the 1963 Limited Test Ban Treaty, which barred nuclear testing in the atmosphere, in outer space and underwater.

He was appointed deputy director of the arms control agency by President Kennedy in 1961, the year it was formed. In his eight years at the agency, an autonomous Government body that is required to coordinate its policies with the State Departrment, Mr. Fisher helped in numerous arms control negotiations. Perhaps none were more important and more successful than the conferences that led to the Test Ban Treaty and the 1968 Treaty for the Nonproliferation of Nuclear Weapons.

Set Testing Restrictions

The 1963 test ban treaty was eventually approved by 120 nations. It limited testing of nuclear weapons by prohibiting the release of detectable radioactivity beyond the national borders of a country conducting the tests. That restriction effectively limited the size of bombs that could be detonated.

In appearances before Congressional committees in 1963, Mr. Fisher was called on to defend a test ban. In an appearance in March of that year, Mr. Fisher said the United States had nuclear superiority over the Soviet Union and cautioned, ''Unlimited testing without an agreement could facilitate Soviet 'equality' with the United States.''

He also participated in negotiations in New York and Geneva that produced the nonproliferation treaty. The director of the arms control agency during Mr. Fisher's tenure was William C. Foster.

Mr. Fisher left the agency in 1969 to become dean at Georgetown's law school, known as the Law Center, and a professor of international law.

As dean, Mr. Fisher was known for his efforts to strengthen the law school financially and to recruit minority students and prominent faculty members. Took Part in Geneva Talks

In 1977, Mr. Fisher was given the rank of ambassador by President Carter and appointed to lead the American delegation to the Geneva conference on disarmament, which was organized to control chemical weapons and produce a comprehensive test ban treaty.

Mr. Fisher's commitment to arms control lasted until his death. Just last August, Mr. Fisher was among six former arms negotiators who joined together to call on the Reagan Administration to resume talks with the Soviet Union on a comprehensive nuclear test ban.

From 1979 to 1982, Mr. Fisher was a law professor at George Mason University, in Fairfax, Va. He held more than a dozen Government jobs in a career that began in Washington in 1938, when he became a Supreme Court law clerk to Justice Louis D. Brandeis. The following year he was named a clerk to Justice Felix Frankfurter.

Among his other Government posts were these: in 1944, assistant to the Assistant Secretary of War; in 1945 and 1946, technical adviser to the American judges at the Nuremberg trials; in 1947 and 1948, solicitor of the Department of Commerce; in 1949, general counsel of the Atomic Energy Commission, and from 1949 to 1953, legal adviser to the State Department.

Mr. Fisher was out of the Government during the Eisenhower Administrations, when he served as a member of the Washington law firm of Covington & Burling. He also was a vice president and counsel of The Washington Post Company in that time.

Adrian Sanford Fisher was born in Memphis on Jan. 21, 1914. At Princeton University, Mr. Fisher, 200 pounds and 6 feet, 1 inch tall, was a guard on the football team. He graduated from Princeton in 1934 and was a 1937 graduate of the Harvard Law School. He served in the Air Force as a navigator.

Surviving are his wife, the former Laura Graham, and their daughters, Laura Donelson Chandler, of Bethesda, Md., and Louise Sanford Fisher, of Pinecliffe, Colo.